Trump Comes for the Judges

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Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau.
I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's show, we'll talk about Donald Trump's probably unlawful order to kill the Department of Education and his move to starve colleges of funding that have political views he doesn't like.
Doge is busy making it harder for seniors to get their social security, which seems efficient. And they literally staged an armed invasion of the U.S.
Institute of Peace. We'll get to that wild story.
And because we're nerds, we're going to dive into the election postmortem from David Shore and Blue Rose Research, which is notable because it includes 26 million survey responses. So lots of data to dig through.
But first, now that we have a Republican Congress that seemingly exists only to do whatever Trump tells them to do, the last remaining check on the president's power is the judicial branch, which Trump and Elon and the MAGA regime are now going to war with. So for several weeks now, the president's billionaire top advisor has been using his social media platform to call for the impeachment of judges that rule against the Trump administration.
But the situation escalated last week when James Boesberg, the chief judge of the D.C. Circuit Court, tried to block Trump from jailing people in a foreign prison without due process, an order that the Trump regime partly ignored, arguing that some of the flights were already over international waters when the ruling came down.
The MAGA position is apparently that the president should be able to lock up whoever he wants in an El Salvador mega prison run by a brutal dictator, so long as he tells us they're a threat to America. We just have to take his word for it.
So one of Trump's minions in Congress, Brandon Gill, introduced articles of impeachment against Judge Boasberg. Trump himself also called for the judge's impeachment.
And here's what he said when asked about it by Laura Ingram this week. Many people have called for his impeachment, the impeachment of this judge.
I don't know who the judge is, but he's radical left. He was Obama appointed.
We have very bad judges and these are judges that shouldn't be allowed. I think they, I think at a certain point, you have to start looking at what do you do when you have a rogue judge? The judge that we're talking about, he's, you look at his other rulings I mean rulings unrelated but having to do with me he's a lunatic you have local judges local federal judges local judges period and DA's and prosecutors DA's state attorney generals attorney generals that want to really take over I think some of it the publicity.
They love the publicity. All of a sudden they're on the front page of every newspaper, but they have no right to be.
So we are only about 60 days into Trump's second term and we are in a very dark place already. So dark, we even got this highly unusual statement from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts this week.
Quote, for more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.
What do you think? John Roberts, welcome to the resistance. I mean, good job, roberts not a sentence we say very often on this podcast yeah i the fact of the statement is very notable right i and i will say that the statement was like there was a lot of sort of like criticism online that he never mentioned trump's name but then when i actually went and read it it's actually a little a lot less mealyed than I assumed.
And John Roberts is pretty mealy-mouthed in a lot of ways. And so to his credit here, and I think the statement probably speaks to what we're going to see from John Roberts over the course of the next few years here, which is trying to walk this fine line between defending the independence of the judiciary and preserving his legacy.
He has overseen the greatest drop in trust in the Supreme Court in its history during his period of time as chief justice,

while not going so far as to poke the bear to the point where Trump will outright defy in order or

even begin to radicalize people against the Supreme Court. Because if Republicans stop liking

the Supreme Court, no one's going to like the Supreme Court because they already turned off

a whole bunch of Democrats with everything they've done, but most notably the Dobbs decision. We should also say this about Judge Boasberg.
He was elevated to the D.C. Circuit Court by Obama, but he was not appointed by Obama.
That is incorrect from Trump, from the White House. Every Republican has been saying that.
He's a George W. Bush appointee.
Some of the things Boasberg has done, he dismissed Trump's tax return lawsuit so that we couldn't see Trump's tax returns. He ordered the release of Hillary's emails.
Limited grand jury material disclosure in Trump's classified documents case. So not exactly.
Maybe we should impeach him. Not exactly a radical left lunatic.
He used to be the head of the FISA court, which is the court that approves surveillance warrants. So this is not some lunatic leftist.
So the White House and Republicans in Congress, they have to know that they don't have anywhere close to the votes needed to impeach anyone, let alone a judge. You need 67 votes in the Senate to convict.
So why do you think they keep pushing this? Like, is the hope that the constant threats and accusations are just going to undermine the legitimacy of the judicial system? Is that the play? Do you think you're sure they know that it takes 67 votes? I mean, I don't think Elon does. He's been tweeting about it forever.
And I think he's just a dumb shit who has not spent a lot of time studying up on the government he's trying to destroy. But that's him.
Yeah. I think Elon, maybe even some of these members of Congress, there is a collection of people with broken brains who spend too much time online, have time reading books who don't know it.
But Stephen Miller was tweeting about this. Those people do know.
And I think the goal here is pretty clear.

It is to set the stage to till the ground for the moment when Trump wants to defy a court order.

Because he has not done that yet.

He has said he's not going to do it.

And he does not have the public on his side, right?

There is a Washington Post-Ipsos poll that shows that 84% of voters, including strong

majorities of Republicans, believe that if a court declares something the Trump administration

is doing is illegal, that Trump must abide by that order.

Only 11% think he should defy it.

And so if you want to get to the point where you can actually do that, you have to do what they did to the media, do what they're doing in the universities. You have to destroy trust in that institution.
And this is the beginning part of that process. We should say that just before we recorded, Judge Boasberg just accused the government of evading its obligations and moved closer to holding them in contempt for not explaining.
They still haven't explained why they didn't abide by his order to turn the planes around. So he is not backing down with all these threats, but he is he's pretty angry at the government and I think he should be.
The Trump administration thinks that they are on solid ground on this one because they think, you know, who really wants Venezuelan gangs in the United States? But the more we learn about this and the more information that's come out, not because of the government, but because of reporting and because some of these people's families have and lawyers have learned about where they are. It is shocking, shocking what is happening.
The New York Times reports that the Trump folks believe that the Alien Enemies Act, which is what Trump invoked to, you know, do this, allows federal agents to enter homes without a warrant. So currently, immigration agents without a warrant can basically just knock on your door and ask to come in.
And that's all they can do unless they have a warrant because of the Fourth Amendment. But Trump and the government are basically now saying, well, Alien Enemies Act, if we think that there's, you know, a Venezuelan gang in there and we've labeled them a domestic terrorist organization or then we can just come, you know, have send federal agents in, federal ICE agents into people's house without a warrant.
which now you may say okay well if i'm a u.s citizen then they're not going to come to my house well how how is anyone going to know? How's anyone going to know? They can show up at a US citizen's house and say they suspect that Trendy Aragua is hiding in your house and then take you away. And who's going to know since we're not doing due process anymore.
We're just fucking putting people on planes, sending them to El Salvador and locking them up for indefinite periods of time. It is just truly astounding that they've taken all of the checks and balances out of the system, right? You don't need to go to a judge to get a warrant to go in the house.
And the person you get in the house, you do not have to present to a judge before you send out the country. And if the Trump administration can be so fucking stupid as to accidentally cancel an Ebola prevention program, do we really think they're not going to make some mistakes on the people they're deporting?

And we're already hearing stories of these.

that there are people waking up in an El Salvadorian mega prison that is famous for how horrible the conditions are,

infamous for how horrible the conditions are, who were not members of these gangs, right?

Who should not have been subject to this.

Because the point is you stop in front of a judge and a judge helps verify that this is the person that the Trump administration says it is. And then if they are a member of this gang or if there's another reason why they should be deported, then they're deported.
But now this is just, I mean, it is fully and totally authoritarian. It runs against everything that our system was set up for.
They grabbed this guy who's a professional soccer player in Venezuela. This guy showed up at two protests to protest Maduro, the dictator in Venezuela.
And Maduro's regime tortured him. and he got away.
He came to the United States. He applied for asylum

and Maduro's regime tortured him. And he got away.
He came to the United States. He applied for asylum.
And they mistakenly think his tattoo is Tren de Aragua when it's actually a fucking soccer tattoo. And so they got the tattoo artist to, like, sign an affidavit to say this.
And so the family was waiting for an immigration hearing and all this because the guy had been held for a while and then just woke up one day and was just taken to this El Salvadoran prison. So a man who was tortured by the Maduro regime is now being held indefinitely in a prison in El Salvador because they mistakenly think he's a gang member.
And then when DHS was asked about this, they're like, well, that's one tattoo. And there was also a social media post where he had a gang sign and that everyone's like, no, that's just a like a thumbs up like soccer sign that they have.
I mean, it's fucking ridiculous. This is what's happening.
No hearing, no evidence, no nothing. It's not good.
It's not good. You see Elon's maxing out on donations to Republicans who support impeaching judges? Of course he is, right? The guy loves to buy a politician.
And giving federally regulated campaign contributions is a particularly inefficient way for Elon Musk to flex his muscle because he can only get the same amount as people like you and I or anyone else out there. But it just creates this incentive structure for more people to act like morons and support these impeachments.
Yeah, exactly. Right.
So you're going to get more people that because they want the money, they want the support, they want the attention that comes from me associated with Elon. And that is one thing Elon Musk is very good about doing.
It is leveraging his money for attention and influence. And this is another way in which he's doing that.
He's also spent well over $10 million on a Wisconsin Supreme Court race that could flip the state's liberal majority back to a conservative majority. So early voting is now underway in that race, and the election is April 1st.
Dan, you want to talk about the stakes here? Yeah. So if you live in Wisconsin, this is an absolutely essential race because the balance of the Supreme Court is once again in question.
You may remember not that long ago, we talked on the show a lot, there was a race to a couple years ago with Janet Proasiewicz, who I think you guys even campaigned with in Wisconsin, won an election, gave the liberals a majority. These are technically nonpartisan races, but the parties have lined up behind the candidates, Democrats behind Susan Crawford, and Elon Musk and Republicans behind Brad Schimmel.
And when the liberals have the majority now, we're able to undo one of the nation's most unfair gerrymandering systems and make it so that you have more free and fair elections. Because Wisconsin, as we all know, is the quintessential battleground state, but Republicans were dominating the legislature and the congressional delegation because of that.
And going forward, the Wisconsin Supreme Court will hear cases on things like abortion, personal freedom, civil rights. And if you think about this from the respect to people who aren't in Wisconsin, many of the big cases that are about how the 2026 and 2028 elections are going to be conducted will come before that court.
So you're either going to have a majority of people who abide by the rule of law or a Supreme Court majority that is bought and paid for by Elon Musk. And just even beyond that for everyone else is this is the first major election in a battleground state since Trump won.
Elon Musk is on the ballot here. He has spent $10 million.
The Democrats and the Crawford campaign have made Elon Musk a centerpiece of it. Brad Schimel has not committed to recusing himself of any cases involving Elon Musk come up before the court, even though Elon Musk has spent already $10 million to elect him.
And this is- And Tesla is currently suing the state of Wisconsin. So the case may come to Brad Schimel, yeah.
And if you want to send a message to Elon Musk and to every Republican in the country about how toxic it is to be associated with what Elon Musk is doing, the best way to do that right now, the best way to inflict some measure of political accountability on Elon Musk and Donald Trump is to win this election in Wisconsin on April 1st. Yeah.
And it's close as they always are in Wisconsin. So it's going to be a really tight race.
In order to tip the race, we're sending John Lovett to Wisconsin this weekend. He's doing six kickoffs.
He's going to be around Madison on Saturday and Milwaukee on Sunday. So go see Lovett if you're in Wisconsin.
And he'll be with Ben Whitler. He's chaper's on this trip.
Yes. To be clear, he's chaperoned.

Yeah, we don't we don't send him to Wisconsin by himself.

And you can also go to votesaveamerica.com slash Wisconsin.

And there's going to be there's plenty to do as we get to Election Day here.

Also, Tommy and I are not going to Wisconsin, but we are going to Norco, California this weekend, Dan.

That is that Norco, California. That is Norco, California.
Norco. Yeah, It's about an hour and a half.
Stay on your side of the grapevine, okay? It's about an hour and a half east of LA. We're going to be with Ro Khanna, who's doing a town hall in the district of a House Republican who refuses to hold a town hall, Ken Calvert.
We've already been to Ken Calvert's district once

when we were trying to elect Will Rollins in this last cycle.

So we're heading back this time with Ro Khanna.

Ro's doing, much like Bernie and AOC are doing these town halls,

Ro is doing a series of town halls as well.

So that'll be fun.

We're going out to see some folks.

So come say hi if you're in Norco. Or come out to Norco if you're in LA.
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Restrictions apply. Big day at the White House on Thursday.
Trump signed an order eliminating the Department of Education, which has already seen its workforce halved. Promises made, promises kept.
the AP notes that the department handles

1.6 trillion dollars

in federal student loans and billions

of dollars in programs for colleges and school districts. It also accounts for roughly 14% of public school budgets.
The White House claims that none of the department's services or benefits will be disrupted, though they aren't saying how they'll do that without, you know, an actual department with actual employees. Here's what Trump had to say at the signing.
Today, we take a very historic action that was 45 years in the making. In a few moments, I will sign an executive order to begin eliminating the federal Department of Education.
And it sounds strange, doesn't it? Department of Education, we're going to eliminate it. And everybody knows it's right.
And the Democrats know it's right. And I hope they're going to be voting for it because ultimately it may come before them.
But everybody knows it's right. It's doing us no good.
We want to return our students to the states. Look, Denmark, Norway, Sweden have to tell you i give them a lot of credit china's top 10 and so we can't now say that bigness is making it impossible to educate because china is very big what the hell is he talking bigness so as you heard him there like they're acknowledging that they'll need congress to shutter the department, though they certainly don't have 60 votes in the Senate for that.

Republicans have already said they'll introduce legislation right after Trump's announcement.

What do you think happens here?

What do you make of all this?

As you mentioned, they're not passing this bill, right?

That is not that is not the Congress is not going to act on this.

To put that in some perspective about how hard it is to to shut down the private education, Ronald Reagan ran on it. It was a big part of his campaign platform.
After winning more than 500 electoral votes in 1984, he couldn't get any traction on it. So it has not become any more popular since then.
The Economist YouGov ran this interesting poll where they asked people about the part of education, do you want to expand it, keep it the same, reduce it, or eliminate it? The plurality was expanded at 39%. They combined keep it the same and expand it was over 60, and only 17% of people wanted to eliminate it.
There is absolutely no appetite for this anywhere. What it is is it's just – this is sort of like the birthright citizenship.
EO, he did. he can say, promise is made, promise is kept, and he did this, and then it goes nowhere.
But it does sort of create the predicate for Musk and Doge to go in there and eliminate it even further, right? Like maybe the building will still stand and there will still be an office that Linda McMahon will have the opportunity to go to periodically, but the core functions, absent some judicial intervention, are going to be gutted, and it's going to have devastating effects. Yeah, I mean, I think they know how unpopular it would be to sort of cut the funding or disrupt benefits and services.
You got student loans in there. You got the education, the Federal Education Department is responsible for Title I funds for the state.
Title I funding is for school, public schools in disadvantaged communities. So poor working class families.
It's for children with disabilities. And so you have kids with disabilities, low income schools and all the student loans in the country.
And the Trump administration is trying to say, well, they're either going to move the distribution of those under other departments, or they're going to have a smaller education, or they're going to have, I don't know what they're going to do. But the idea that those services are going to be completely uninterrupted just doesn't square with what most people in education believe, experts in education believe, and also how the entire Doge process has gone so far.
That's the key point. That's the key point.
Like they might think to themselves genuinely that they're not going to disrupt any services and benefits, but they keep firing everyone who knows anything about education. It's like, to what end, right? Is that they want a real estate transaction to sell the building? It's just, this has been, this is a- They think they're saving so much money just like getting rid of all those employees and they're not because that's not where most of the money that the Department of Education oversees is coming from.
It's just, it's also stupid. Like this is a way to check off something that was on the wishlist long before Project 2025.
It was a big part of Project 2025. This has been Newt Gingrich ran on this in the 90s with a contract for America.
This has been a Republican pipe dream. And this is where you get a chance to say they did it.
Even if they're not accomplishing the specific goal because they do need Congress for it, they can accomplish the goal in spirit, which is to gut public education in this country. It seems like a good fight for Democrats to take on.
What do you think? I very much think so. In fact, if you're a message box subscriber, you have in your inbox right now a full messaging guide on this.
If you are not a message box subscriber, you're lost, I guess. Well, then I don't know what you've been doing.
But let me get so I go through a whole bunch of the polling on a bunch of the message guidance.

But let me give the short version of how I think Democrats should talk about this, which is Elon Musk and Donald Trump are shutting down the Department of Education and gutting public education to pay for tax cuts for billionaires.

The result of this is going to be teachers are laid off, more kids in the classroom, dilapidated schools, and huge cut to special education funding, all to pay for tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy like Elon Musk and Donald Trump. That is how you talk about it.
It is not about cutting individual funding streams. It is important to say why they're doing it, what is going to happen, be specific on what's going to happen, and who it benefits.
Yeah. I think along with some of the healthcare cuts, this is going to be probably what's going to piss people off the most, especially if and when we start getting the stories about people whose benefits or loans or whatever else or funding for certain schools was disrupted.
Then I think it's really going to blow up. There's just a context for limiting the part of education that does not exist for USAID, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or the Institute of PEDAS we'll talk about in a minute.
People have been talking about this for a very long time. This country's been trying to do it for a long time.
Voters keep rejecting it time and time again. And now Trump is doing it unilaterally at the behest of the world's richest man in order to pay for tax cuts for billionaires.
And so this is a huge opportunity for Democrats. It is one of the things that has the best chance of breaking through in the flood of all the terribleness that's happening.
So, and Trump is also targeting colleges and universities he doesn't like. We have mentioned before the $400 million in federal funding he's threatened to withhold from Columbia unless the school acquiesces to the administration's demands, the deadline for which is Friday when you're listening to this.
Some of those demands, banning masks because they were used at the protests last year, giving campus law enforcement wider latitude to arrest, quote, agitators who foster an unsafe or hostile work or study environment, and placing the school's Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies in, quote, academic receivership, which means it's no longer overseen by the actual faculty who teach within it. Now, Trump is also going after his own alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, where the administration froze around $175 million in federal funds because of a trans athlete and swimmer, Leah Thomas, who competed and graduated in 2022.
The White House rapid response account posted a clip of Fox News announcing the move with the words promises made, promises kept. Given that Leah Thomas graduated three years ago, is this promises made, promises kept, or just another way to own the libs that's going to end up just hurting a lot of students at the University of Pennsylvania? I mean, it's clearly punitive.
It's clearly not based on any sort of substance or reality. And I think we have to view it in the context of the larger conservative project to systematically and strategically take out any institution that they view as an opposition to right-wing thinking in this country.
It's why they why they spent so much time to try to take down unions, right? Passing right-to-work laws. It is why they have gone after the media, which they view as an, you know, incorrectly my view, but view as an ally of liberals and Democrats, in part because they are fact-checking and calling out the hypocrisy of what's on the right.
And universities, which they've always believed to be a breeding ground of liberal thought. And so they are trying to destroy them.
They are trying to cowl them into acting a certain way, and they are trying to gut their funding. And it is part of a bigger project.
And we have to view it in that context, I think. Alan Blinder at the New York Times reported on Thursday about layoffs, hiring freezes, lab shutdowns at universities across the country.
What'd you make of that story? I mean, this is the end result of what they're doing. I thought was notable in that story was that they wrote that academia was caught flat-footed.
I was like, oh, the one time the famously nimble academia was asleep at the wheel. I mean, there is a longer term challenge.
There is more appetite for what Trump is doing here. And it's not just because of the protests around Gaza and the controversy of how a lot of universities handled that and what some of the presidents said before Congress.
This was in the New York Times, I don't know, Pew tracks how people feel about the impact of various institutions on American society, and they ask people at universities. And in 2012, only 21% of Americans thought that universities had a negative impact on our society.
And by last year, it was up to 45%. And that's not just Trump on Republicans.
That is the high cost of college. It is student debt crushing people and this idea that people have been sold on this idea that the best pathway to success is a four-year college education, but you're going to leave there with so much debt that it is going to crush you financially.
and universities have done a very bad job of both in the short term around trump and the

time before that of one dealing with the sort of indefensible rise in tuition but in sort of

explaining the role they play. And because they are these nonprofit institutions, some of whom, like the most famous ones, who have billions of dollars in endowment, but then take taxpayer money.
And what we have not explained, and they have not explained, and maybe people before Trump did not explain well, is that these universities are the laboratories for America, right? They're the ones doing the research that is helping us build new technologies, discover new medicines, figure out how to fight disease. And the universities haven't made that case, and people supporting that sort of R&D funding have not made that case.
Well, and the two problems you just mentioned are undoubtedly going to get worse because of what the Trump administration has already done. Universities have not kept tuition down.
They haven't done a good job. And so, you know, therefore we are subsidizing higher costs at universities through financial aid, student loans, and all the other stuff that the federal government does to help students attend school.
the costs keep rising and rising and rising so that's a huge problem but gutting a bunch of federal funding at universities uh do we think that's going to make tuition go down we think that's going to help costs at college well they're not interested in they want fewer people to go to college right and then the other and then the big one that you mentioned is between what the trump administration is doing to colleges and universities, between what they're doing to the NIH, what they're doing to other public health agencies, other agencies that are responsible for medical research, for technological research. research.
I mean, it's not, look, part of this is you gut research here and innovation and medical

research and scientific research. There's going to be a huge brain drain and a lot of these

scientists and researchers and experts are going to go to other countries and other countries are going to develop the breakthrough technologies and discoveries and cures that usually happen in the United States. And the industries and jobs and everything else is going to go overseas as well.
And we're not going to have them here. But then there's a broader issue, which is like the United States is the place where a lot of these discoveries happen.
And if they don't happen here because we're gutting the funding for them, they're just not going to happen. And there's like there's like there was a diabetes study that was like a 30 year diabetes study that they just canceled the contract for.
And you're not getting that back. You can't turn this stuff back on.
There was a report right before Trump took office about how close we were coming to a vaccine to deal with colorectal cancer. I thought it was pancreatic, wasn't it? Or maybe it was both.
I think there was an mRNA for pancreatic cancer. Well, we can leave all of this in.
Yeah. But anyway, there was multiple- But we're on the cusp of something incredibly important.
Like all of the progress it's made on Alzheimer's retorts, all of that stops and it doesn't start again. Oh, yeah.
And the law, so that's the, as you pointed out, like that is the progress on very specific things that have tremendous benefit to people in the world is going to stop and it's not going to happen. And then there is sort of the economic impact in the United States where, you know, these universities, like in this story, they talk about how they may have to stop teaching biochemistry at universities because the labs are funded by research grants.
And if the research grants are not there, the labs are not there. And then they won't teach that.
And so the next generation of scientists, researchers, doctors, technologists, all of that is not

going to happen because of this idiotic, short-sighted effort from the Trump administration.

And fixing this is not- And for nothing. For nothing.
This is not saving us much money.

This is not changing bloated budgets that needed to be changed. This is just destroying shit

Thank you. nothing this is not saving us much money this is not changing like bloated budgets that you know needed to be changed this is just destroying shit because they don't know what the fuck they're doing they're going in with the sledgehammer elon musk doesn't know what the fuck he's doing doge doesn't know what the fuck they're doing donald trump certainly doesn't know what the fuck he's doing neither is his dumb fucking cabinet and now and like and the saddest part is like we're not gonna to know, you know, like there's just going to be these, these studies are going to go cabinet.
And the saddest part is like, we're not going to know. There's just going to be these studies are going to go away and these researchers are going to lose their jobs.
And we're not going to know all of the potentially life-saving discoveries that we lost like 10 years down the road. Yeah.
It is deeply depressing because so much in between administrations can be turned back on. There's tremendous damage in the four years, but you come back in, you can put in new policy, sign a new executive order, pass a new law.
The things that Trump is doing, both to universities and the federal government itself, are not things that can be fixed in one four-year term. I know.
I keep thinking about like the next Democrats running for president or, you know, God willing, the next Democratic president. And there's's gonna have to be like a sort of a massive nationwide maybe even global effort to like try to recruit really good smart people back into government and public service and and researchers and scientists and medical and just like and experts and it's gonna i think it's gonna be really fucking hard too, because again, why are you taking it? Like, maybe you want to work for the next democratic administration, but what happens when another, a JD Vance or another Trump comes into office and then you don't have job security anymore.
Right. Like can the next democratic president bring in a bunch of incredibly talented political appointees to tackle these problems? Absolutely.
And I suspect that will happen. There will be a mobilization of the best and the brightest to come in and do that.
But what about the people who keep the government running all the time? The ones who have these jobs in part because of job security. They could do other things, but they're in it for public service and they're in it because there's a stability in government employment with good benefits.
You know what the pay structure is.

You can be there a long time.

And if that security will no longer exist,

having those people there is going to be deeply damaging.

I don't know what we would have done when we arrived in the White House if there hadn't been a whole bunch of people who'd been there

for the last three presidencies who had been making everything work,

who knew things, who had institutional knowledge.

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Speaking of Doge, let's check in with the Doge bags and Trump's broader effort to destroy the federal government. Politico reported Wednesday that the Department of Agriculture, USDA, is stopping millions of dollars worth of deliveries to food banks in at least six states.

And earlier this week, the Social Security Administration announced that you can no longer apply for benefits or change the account where your benefits are delivered over the phone.

You either have to verify your identity online or go in person to your local Social Security

office, which will be tough because the AP reported that almost 50 Social Security offices have shown up on Doge's list of federal government site closures. Is this government efficiency at its finest, Dan? We're just making it harder for seniors to obtain their social security benefits.
It is Donald Trump waging war on his own voters, right? The people are going to be affected most are the people in the rural parts of the country where they are not near a social security office, and probably the nearest one just got on that list of 50 that's going to get closed, and it's going to make it impossible for people to get their benefits. There was a report today that there was a two-hour wait time for calls right now and a one-month waiting period for appointments in an office that may close sometime soon.
It is truly insane. And these are the kind of things that have real political impact.
Congressman Michael Lawler, the Republican, today put out a statement attacking, criticizing Trump and Musk for trying to close the Hudson Valley Social Security office. So I think you're going to see that from a lot of people because this is where it matters.
This idea that you're going to make it impossible for people their benefits you're going to make people you know older folks have to verify their identity online as opposed to be able to call or i mean is truly is going to be is deeply damaging and i think is going to hurt politically too 39 million people live in households without any internet connection 25 of americans 65 or older have reported never going online so and those are those are social security beneficiaries and like you said if you the the um low income areas rural areas people with disabilities people who just can't get around because they're older um those are going to be the people hurt by this and i don't know maybe mike lawler because he's a Republican in good standing or will do something crazy. Maybe he'll maybe he'll Mike Lawler will introduce a couple articles of impeachment against a federal judge.
And then they'll open up the Hudson Valley office and they'll close one down in a in a blue district. That's that's probably where we're headed.
I do think this is I'm sure Democrats are going to be all over this one because every single poll you see everywhere is Social security is like the number one issue for folks and it's probably uh it's the number one vulnerability for republicans and it's probably why donald trump has said over and over again he's not going to touch social security so um hoping that the democrats jump all over this go i mean this is old school but go do press conferences outside the social security offices on that Yeah, that's a good idea. Invite some influencers.
We'll make it new age communications, but go stand in front of them. Take a vertical video of yourself in front of one, but go to a social security office.
Bring all your canes. Wave them around.
Go from the Tesla dealers to the social security offices, right?

Fewer Tesla dealers, more social security offices.

Again, peaceful.

One last Doge item.

Not so peaceful.

We got to talk about Doge's armed invasion of the U.S. Institute of Peace.

This is unfortunately a real story, Dan.

Here's the short version.

Some Doge bags gained access to the Institute of Peace on Monday night. The Institute of Peace, we should let you know, is a non-profit organization.
It is not part of the executive branch. It is funded by Congress.
It was founded by Congress, funded by Congress. It's a non-profit, but of course it has government money.
And the job of the Institute of Peace is to help resolve conflicts around the world, as the name suggests. But Donald Trump decided we're going to zero out the Institute of Peace, a couple other agencies, just like they're doing everywhere else.
Okay. So the dogebags get access to the Institute of Peace on Monday night by apparently threatening the federal contracts for the outside private security firm that the Institute employed.
This is according to Politico. Some of the staff at the Institute of Peace tells the dogebags that they're trespassing, but then they ignore the Institute of Peace staffers, the doge bags, and they, quote, proceeded to walk towards the gun safe.
Then the Institute of Peace staffers contact DC's Metropolitan Police Department on the trespassers, on the doge people, but in an alarming twist, the police end up detaining the Institute of peace's head of security and lawyers instead at the direction of a state department flunky who has since been declared the u.s institute of peace's new acting president and who by that time had shown up with even more doge bags dc police said in a statement that they were contacted by the u.s attorney's office, our pal Ed Martin, his office in D.C., eagle-eyed Ed, who's threatening, you know, members of Congress and everyone else. Crazy man.
The Institute then filed an emergency request in court trying to deny Doge access, which Judge Beryl Howell denied, though she did question Doge's tactics. Good for her.
Thank you. She said, quote, this conduct of using law enforcement, threatening criminal investigation, and using armed law enforcement from three different agencies.
Why? Just because Doge is in a rush? Feels like all this could have been handled in a few emails. Like, I mean, hey, could you clear out of the office? We've zeroed out your budget.
Like, what? Or if what or or if they refuse to like hey we're gonna take you to court then because we believe we can shut your agency down and you don't think we can but we like what what did you make of all this i mean just it's truly perfect a bunch of tech flunkies arranging an armed invasion of the institute of peace i mean it, it's just, I mean, they don't have, probably don't have the authority to shut the thing down. Like that is, you know, it is not, as you said, not a part of the executive branch per se created by Congress.
And like this sort of like brute force activity taking on the deep state. Ooh, we bullied the Institute of Peace guys.
It's like bravado. It's just, it's like, there's like, that is, that'll get you plaudits in MAGA Trump world.
And so you can just, you'll see more of this absurdity. Like they seem so tough the way they got the cops to help them get into the Institute of Peace.
And as opposed to just doing it, like,

I guess another way I think about this is there is a right way and a wrong way to do these things.

Even if you disagree,

even no matter what you feel about the value of the Institute of Peace,

there's a,

you know,

a way to go about it,

but they,

Elon Musk and Doge will not and cannot do it the right way,

which constantly keeps hurting their efforts to do the thing that we disagree

with.

Cause they keep getting stopped in court and it keeps being messier and dumber than it needs to be. But this is just like the extreme example of that.
Yeah. And it's what's really I mean, it is there's a lot of humor to that story because it's so fucking absurd.
What's really worrying about it is like, so now we have the department of homeland security and ice agents deciding that they don't need a warrant anymore and that they can now you know go in and look for trend de aragua in any house that they want we are flying people to prisons in el salvador with no due process we have a u attorney in D.C. who is now like sending FBI agents and D.C.
police in to detain these staffers at this agency who just didn't want to let a bunch of people in to shut them down. And what kind of like government bureaucrat or person at a nonprofit is going to want to live in Washington, D.C.? And you start thinking like, oh yeah, that's what they're trying to do here.
They're trying to make the city Trump city now. Yeah, to make everything so uncomfortable that people will just leave.
And they've had great success at that. They've had great success.
And like the number of examples now of using the power of the state, force, police, FBI, like just against Americans, against immigrants, against people they don't like. It's very scary.
We are so far past right now what even some of the most hyperbolic arguments about what Trump would do are. We are right there.
Yep. Yep.
And it is, I don't know if it's like, part of it is the, I know part of it's the media environment. I keep wondering why there's not more alarm every day.
And I don't know if it's just some people are like, I can't, I can't tune in all the time. I can't, you know, get worried about this all the time.
If it's just that people don't know, if people aren't hearing about it all, if Democrats aren't fighting hard enough or making enough noise. Like, I don't know what it is, but it feels oddly quiet for the level of insanity that's taking place right now.
I've been thinking a lot about, there are a million reasons for this. I think we, as a society, like political stakeholders, the media, just average everybody, people lack the vocabulary and the imagination to talk about what's happening here because it's not something that we ever thought would happen in this country.
Yeah. And so we just don't know how to do it.
And almost every other country in the world has faced this down at some point, or they've gone through it, where they've had an authoritarian regime, or they've been in a dictatorship, and they've come out of that with so much reform. That's never happened here.
It's never been a fear here since the very beginning. And so we just can't comprehend it.
I'm not complaining about the New York here. But like, as an example, when Trump gave that insane speech at the Department of Justice, where he goes to the Department of Justice, a place where presidents almost never go and gives a speech, calling out his enemies while surrounded by his self-appointed law enforcement hacks.
And it was like, Trump gives unusual, unusually fiery speech at the Department of Justice or something like that. Just like, we can't, we don't, no one knows how to talk about it.

But there is a media environment change here too.

Think about what it felt like in 2018 when people became aware that Trump was putting

kids in cages in detention centers.

And the outrage, it dominated the conversation.

I mean, I was on a book tour at the time.

I lost all my interviews, right?

Because that's all I didn't want to talk about for good reason, right? That was the right choice. It became the dominant national story.
Now- Think about the first week when people flooded the airports because of the Muslim ban. Well, that's the response, right? That's another point is that there was a way in which the quote unquote resistance was involved ingetting tactics that did drive some of these things, which is not happening now to the same extent.
But just think about everything you said about what's happening in El Salvador. If that had happened in a 2017, 2018 media environment, it would be a dominant conversation, but nothing can be a dominant conversation right now in the same way.
And that's not just because Trump is a more effective flood the zone strategy now. It's because just the world has changed so much and people are living in these algorithmically designed bubbles.
The power and reach and influence of the people who could drive the conversation on a mass scale just does not – it's just massively diminished from where it was years ago. So we are – I mean, this is how this happens, right? This is exactly how it happens is that people aren't paying enough attention.
And the people who are opposing it are not drawing enough attention or grabbing people by the lapels to make them pay attention. And we are headed someplace very dangerous.
I've been wondering if this also partly explains sort of the odd polling numbers for Trump that we've been getting, which is he's so underwater on the economy. And it's like the one issue that's dragging him down the most.
And on a lot of other issues and his overall approval rating, it's not as low as you would think. And I would I wonder if it's because the economy and inflation and cost of living is like the one issue that people are experiencing every day, even if they're not tuning into the news and the Trump show version two.
And all the other stuff is just not breaking through as much because people aren't paying as close attention and because the media environment is so diffuse. Yeah, your news consumption is not correlated with your exposure to high prices.
right like your news consumption is correlated correlated with whether you know about what's happening in El Salvador or the shutting down part of education or any of the other 12 terrible things we're going to talk about on this pod and future pods. But whether you can follow no news, you still have to go to the store and buy eggs, gas, food.
You have to pay your rent, your mortgage, et cetera. Yeah.
And that's always been true, right? Like even before we entered this fucked up era, the one issue that you cannot make go away is the economy, whether that's layoffs, high unemployment, or inflation. Pod Save America is brought to you by Mint Mobile.
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Okay, before we get to the new 2024 postmortem, it's time for our weekly corrupt date. What do you think, Dan? That's pretty good.
I think that's pretty good. We've been through a lot of options here, and I think that's well done.
That's what gave us corrupt date. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who's become a real hype man for the administration's griftiest stunts, was focused this week on the only commerce that matters, the kind that puts more money in the pockets of the world's richest man.
Here's Lutnik on Jesse Waters with a free ad for Elon and free stock tips for all of us. Buy Tesla.
It's unbelievable that this guy's stock is this cheap. It'll never be this cheap again.
People are going to be dreaming of today and Jesse Waters and thinking, gosh, I should have bought Elon Musk's stock. Elon Musk is probably the best person to bet on I've ever met.
He's building the coolest robots you've ever seen. Go online and look up Optimus.
It is the coolest thing you've ever seen. We're all going to be buying robots.
They're going to cost about $30,000. You're going to be buying a Tesla robot and anybody who doesn't buy a Tesla robot is going to be silly.
No one's going to be key in anything. Here's a tough headline from Axios that followed Lutnik's appearance.
Tesla falls after Commerce Secretary recommends buying stock. That's a good headline.
What do you think? Are we all idiots if we don't buy $30,000 Tesla robots? It feels like there's a real chance those robots are going to turn on people and I don't want them in my house. You know, you got $30,000 laying around, you buy a Tesla robot, buy some stock.
The commerce secretary telling people to buy an individual stock. Like everyone else has to specifically put like in, like lead their tweets about it.
This is not financial advice, right? And here he is, an official of the federal government who is theoretically an expert in the economy, just pitching the stock of the president's biggest owner. I mean, his boss was hawking Teslas on the White House lawn, so it's kind of all fits.
Yeah. Did you see that Pam Bondi announced, quote, severe charges against violent Tesla arsonists,

who she's accusing of domestic terrorism now that vandalism against Tesla dealerships is domestic terrorism?

Up to 20 years in prison for lighting Teslas on fire.

I have three thoughts on this.

One, don't light Teslas on fire.

Don't light anything on fire.

Arson is bad.

No. Arson is bad.
Two, I don't know. That's our squishy centrist opinion.
That's right. Make it the episode title.
Arson is bad. Two, arsonists should go to jail, although I'm not sure this is technically domestic terrorism.
And three, there is a bigger thing here, and you see it in the comments, you see it on Trump selling Tesla teslas in the white house lawn is that the world's richest man spent 300 million dollars to get this president elected now he has basically bought a government right where you have the commerce secretary pitching his stock the president's pitching his cars and the attorney general of the united states the chief law enforcement officer going before the cameras to threaten the people who are protesting at his dealerships specifically she's not doing that for other things. She specifically, like he has his own government to do his bidding.
And it is truly wild. It's a good corrupt date.
All right. So we're finally getting some higher quality data about what happened in the 2024 election.
At least higher quality than exit polls. David Shore and the folks at Blue Rose Research combined precinct level data from across the country with the 26 million survey responses they got from voters in 2024 to give us a pretty clear picture of who voted and why.
Here are a few of the big takeaways, none of them too surprising, but they really just sort of confirm some of the initial findings that we have been going over over the last couple months. Number one, Hispanic, Asian, young voters, immigrants, and politically disengaged voters swung towards Trump by significant margins.
In fact, politically disengaged voters swung towards Trump by so much that if everyone who stayed home in 2024 had voted, Trump would have won the popular vote by nearly five points. Number two, Trump's favorability rating on Election Day 2024 was almost exactly the same as it was on Election Day 2020.
The difference was that Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party were much less popular. And number three, the issues most important to voters were the issues where trust in Democrats were lowest.
Cost of living, the economy, inflation, taxes, and spending. The next most important issue to voters was health care, which is the first issue where Democrats were more trusted than Republicans.

In fact, the only five issues that were ranked important by more than 50% of voters where Dems were also trusted more than Republicans were healthcare, poverty, housing, mental health,

and Medicare. And by the way, except for Medicare, maybe mental health, healthcare,

they weren't trusted that much more than Republicans. And Republicans are trusted more on Social Security than Democrats.
Yes. Oh, thank you.
Yes. All right.
Where do you want to start? So we can get into the details here, and I encourage everyone to read the whole study. I will stipulate at the beginning here that this report has some controversy in Democratic circles.
There are people who disagree with some of the conclusions from it. This is one report, right? We're going to get other reports.
I think David's a pretty smart guy, and he's been pretty pressing on a lot of things, but we're looking at one report here. My takeaway from this is it adds some granular detail to what we've been talking about since the election.
But one way to think about these results is that everything that we thought was going to happen after Trump was elected in 2016 to politics, right, to the Republican coalition, to everything, the exact opposite happened.

Right.

It just – the idea was that Trump came in with this racist rhetoric and he was doing all this horrible immigration stuff and he was going to forever cost the Republicans votes with Latinos and black voters. Instead, he made gains there.
And in fact, now politics has actually become less racially polarized with Donald Trump as president, where black and Latino voters who identify as moderate conservative are now voting for Republicans at levels similar to white moderates and conservatives.

Young voters, the belief was that Donald Trump was going to radicalize all these young voters to be Democrats.

The view was that in 2017, people who were young voters then were the most progressive generation in history.

Now, by some measures, you could argue that Gen Z is the most – driven mostly by young men, but not entirely – that Gen Z is the most conservative generation out there. And this is one stat here that just – we have to just germinate on.
A 75-year-old white man was more likely to support Kamala Harris than an 18-year-old white man. That's the exact opposite of what everyone thought after Trump won in 2016.
I mean, it's also the numbers around naturalized citizens. This is going to be my other huge thing here.
Our best estimate is that immigrant voters swung from a Biden plus 27 voting block in 2020 to a Trump plus one group in 2024.

He fucking won immigrants.

Yeah.

And this is not they note here.

This is not a small group.

Either naturalized citizens make up around 10 percent of the electorate.

Now, again, this is that is based largely on precinct data. And of course, you can look at heavily immigrant precincts and and look at the swings.
You know, Lovett and I were talking about this. You might also guess that, OK, maybe in these precincts where there are a lot of immigrants, maybe the white voters swung more or maybe other voters swung more or Americans by birth swung more.
But when you combine that with their survey responses and you look at the districts they looked at or the precincts they looked at, which were heavily, heavily immigrant, that can explain maybe some of it on the margins, but it can explain the whole swing swing. That can make a little bit of difference in the battleground states when you look at precincts in Queens and the Bronx and some of the other ones where we saw huge Trump swings.
This is one of the reasons that the Republican Advantage on Electoral College diminished this time because Trump was making these gains in immigrant communities in blue states. Yeah.
Are there any charts or other takeaways that jumped out at you the most? And we can always put the charts up on the screen because we have the presentation here. Yeah.
I would say the immigrant chart was the one that really stuck out to me because that, once again, just runs counter to the exact opposite of what you would think. Here is someone who ran on building a wall to keep immigrants out, who passed a Muslim ban or signed a Muslim ban to keep immigrants out, who put kids in cages and then ran on mass deportation in his next presidential campaign, and he won immigrants.
And we have to really dig in to why that is and where it is we failed to be able to make a case to those voters. Before we move on, like overall, real quick, what kind of messaging strategy and attention strategy would you take from this data that you haven't already taken away from the results? So when you look at like that chart that runs issue salience with issue trust, obviously it's devastating for Democrats.
But when you look at that, you sort of are saying, how do we win power back? And so you have – there are two potential paths there. One is you can look at the issues that voters already care about that they don't trust us on, and we can try to win trust back there.
And we should definitely do that. That is a medium and long-term strategy.
But in the short term, the strategy is to erode trust in the Republicans and Trump on those issues, right? And you're seeing that already on inflation in the economy. And so we have to keep doing that.
And there is a seesaw effect to politics where if one side goes down, the other side goes up. So that will help us there.
But the other strategy that you have to think about is can you take the issues where we are trusted and make them more front of mind and salient? Like you're never going to get – as we mentioned before, you're never going to make inflation not top of mind to voters, right? The economy will always – people's personal financial system will always top. But immigration is an issue that Trump made front of mind, right? He made it front of mind even before the border crisis.
He created the idea that in people's minds, completely fabricated, that we were living in a wave of migrant and immigrant crime. And Democrats are defeatist on this sometimes.
And so we sort of say, we don't have the power, the gumption, the megaphone, the messengers to take an issue that people trust us on and make it a top issue. Some of that is true.
Some of that's the reality of our messaging situation. But the thing I look at is that healthcare dot.
And you say, there is our opportunity right there. And there's two opportunities right in front of us.
One, if Republicans in Congress do not act, premiums are going to go up for millions of Americans because the additional funding and tax credits that went in place during the pandemic are going to expire this year. And so Trump is going to raise people's premiums.
And the second one is Medicaid, right? Medicaid is healthcare for many Americans. It pays for so much of healthcare.
You know, what is it? Something like 40% of births in America are paid for by Medicaid and the Republicans want to gut that. And so here's a chance where there is an issue that voters care about, where we have a huge trust advantage on, and we have two opportunities to drive that message home this year.
And raising trust, like these things are, they're not, they don't operate independently of each other, right? If we raise the salience and trust of us on healthcare, that's going to help us on the other economic issues, right? Because it's going to seem like we're fighting for people. And that's what we have to do.
Almost as you were talking, I was looking at some of the issues. There's a cluster of issues in this chart where people rank them above 50% importance and people trust Republicans more, but only slightly.
So those are issues that I think we could like. And education is one.
We just talked about that. Housing, we're slightly more trusted.
Civil liberties and privacy, which they are destroying right now, the Trump administration. Social security, which is talked about.

And political division. So all issues that people really care about and they trust Republicans slightly more.
Those seem like issues that we can claw back some trust on. Okay, so because we're nerds, we have a lot more we want to get into on this.
if you really want to hear us go deep on this you can listen to the rest of this conversation

on Dan's subscriber-exclusive show, Polar Coaster. We're going to talk about it now, and then we're going to have the rest of the conversation on Polar Coaster.
So you can listen by subscribing to Friends of the Pod at crookka.com slash friends. So go check out the rest of this conversation because we have a lot more to talk about with these results.
And we're going to answer some of your questions about them. Two quick housekeeping notes.
Assembly required with Stacey Abrams. Check out the latest episode.
Stacey faces each executive order, legislative policy in every news cycle, no matter how terrifying or absurd, by asking what can we do to learn more about what's happening? What can we do to solve problems, however small? And how can we find the kind of hope that can sustain our work in difficult times? Listen to Assembly Required every Thursday on Amazon Music. Also, check out the latest episode of Inside 2025.
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